UNetbootin allows you to easily adapt a Linux CD image to boot off of a USB flash drive or memory card. Have a system without a CD drive? Create a bootable USB drive to run your Linux installer.

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the book loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own.

StartUp Manager, or SUM, is a gui tool for changing settings in Grub, Grub2 and Usplash.SUM should work with recent versions of Debian and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu.

Everytime I install Ubuntu, my usplash (the boot GUI) is 640x480. So here is howto make the usplash resolution fit your display resolution:

Here I will share some methods on tweaking and optimizing your ubuntu install that I have learned over the years tweaking linux. This is small and sweet, down to the point and can dramatically speed up your system.

Chainloading an operating system allows grub to boot an opearating system's boot loader. This is commonly used to boot Windows for instance. I personnaly use it to be able to have my "production" system's grub on the MBR, and address other distros'grub install on their root partition. The advantage is that kernel updates are real easy to handle. Each testing distro modifying their own grub won't interfere with my main OS bootloader.

Preload – is an application that practically pre-loads or better still caches your frequently used applications with the aim of speeding up their load-time. This application that works in the background deploys only unused RAM and does not consume your system memory as imagined.

On a recent vacation my laptop boot time (>4 min.) started getting on my nerves. I resolved to enjoy the vacation but fix things on my return. At home a few minutes with Google brought bootchart to my attention.

In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu's boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes.

If you have been using Ubuntu for a while, you probably know that after 30 boots Ubuntu runs a check on the hard disk. This “Fsck” check slows down booting a lot. AutoFsck runs the check on shutdown instead, and asks you if it is a good time first. If the occasional slow boot is a problem for you, AutoFsck is perfect.

This is for people who have a dual boot installation of Ubuntu and Window (XP or Vista). When booting you will see that Ubuntu has created a boot menu that allows you to select an OS to start. It will usually look somewhat like this:

If you’ve ever wanted to completely clone your Ubuntu install, with all of the tweaks, files you’ve downloaded and changes you’ve made to it, there’s a fairly simple way to do this. This is great if you want a complete backup, or if you’re looking to move your system to a newer (read: bigger, faster, stronger) hard drive or even just to clone your install to other machines with the same hardware.

As you might have noticed yourself by now, the Grub screen looks quite plain, simple and dull. Even with colours or Grub themes. Gfx Boot is a powered version of GRUB Bootloader and it’s able to load themes instead of 16 colour splashes. Here are a couple of screenshots, just to get an idea about it and maybe make you want to beautifulize grub (yeah, i know it’s not a word but it sounds cool):

Installing Ubuntu [and most other Linux distros] isn't too difficult. In fact with the latest liveCD installs it has become easier than ever before. However, it is still possible for the installation process will go wrong and fail. This has happened to me on a couple of occasions and it has left me with a system that is incapable of booting.

One of the things in Ubuntu that has always driven me crazy is the addition of new items into the grub menu without removing the old entries that likely don't even work anymore.